So many interesting things...

...I'm afraid I'll forget them all if I don't write them here.

In no particular order:

A poster from Lauren Bakaletz's group:  T4P-dependent twitching motility can be assessed by formation of satellite colonies on special alkaline agar plates.  Perhaps we should try this with our hypercompetent Rd strains.

Neutrophil nets:  Neutrophils have a form of apoptosis in which they extrude DNA and other cell materials, forming nets that cover bacterial biofilms growing on epithelia.  Probably related, some Camplyobacter mutants produce biofilms that are held together by networks of DNA fibers.  Neisseria secretes a very stable DNase (one of yesterday's posters), maybe to cut through these nets.

From the "$1 Bacterial Genome" session:   Right now, Illumina sequencing can do pools of 15-20 bacterial genomes per lane (~130 genomes total in 8 lanes) at about $200/genome.  That's for 50-fold coverage, which is what George Weinstock recommends for Illumina.  The big costs aren't the sequencing but the sample acquisition (the genome DNA preps need to be tagged with sequence 'barcodes' before they're pooled) and strain curation and the post-sequencing informatics. But I think we wouldn't need barcoding for our project.  The H. influenzae genome is on the small side, so for our pooled recombinant genomes I think that means we could do an Illumina lane and get about 2000-fold coverage of the pool for about $3000!